Problem: Most education standards are written by an external body, and are not subject to continuous revision.

Most education standards are written by a group of people who are pulled together for the specific purpose of writing a set of standards. This might be a number of people from around a state education system who are pulled together throughout a school year to develop an individual state's standards, or it might be a group that is sponsored full-time to develop a set of standards.

The main problem with this model is that the sponsoring group almost always retains control over the standards that are developed. Using these standards commits you to going wherever this sponsoring body leads.

Open Competencies makes it easier to develop your own set of education standards, by giving you a dedicated tool for creating standards. Right now you can start with an empty template, and develop a set of standards for an entire school or for a single subject. When Open Competencies is complete you'll be able to start from scratch, or build on the standards any other school has developed.

Try it out: To create a new school, you'll have to be logged in. Once you create an account, you'll be able to create your own school and begin developing your own set of standards.

Problem: Many ed-tech resources are built more with a profit motive in mind than with a goal of serving all students.

There are many good education-related resources available now, but many of them have significant financial and proprietary issues. Proprietary resources will never foster widespread adoption of truly innovativate approaches to education. Charging money for educational resources, while appropriate at times, significantly increases the friction involved in adopting those resources. There is a strong need for high-quality, fully open educational resources.

Open Competencies is a fully open project. The code for this site is open source, and licensed under the MIT license. The actual competencies published on Open Competencies are licensed under the creative commons CC BY 4.0 license.

Try it out: If you are a developer, please take a look at the project on github. Please share some feedback if you'd like to see this project fully developed.